What a product is

You’ll need: Products — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

A product is one thing a customer can buy. Everything in this course hangs off that record, so it is worth understanding what it holds before you create two hundred of them.

The fields that matter on day one

Product name and product summary describe it. Both are translatable, so a product carries a name per language rather than one name that is wrong for half your visitors.

SKU is its code. One is generated for you; you do not need to invent a scheme, and you should not overwrite a code once documents reference it.

Prices hold what you charge, per currency. Price unit of measurement says what a price is for — per kilogram, per metre, per box — which is the difference between a customer understanding your price and guessing at it.

Photos sell the thing. On a grid of cards, the photograph is what a customer reads first.

Where it appears, and where it does not

Hide from shop takes a product off your public site while keeping it usable internally — right for something you sell only on request, or are not ready to publish.

Locations says where the product is available, tying back to the business locations from Essentials.

The three fields people misread

Is digital marks something with no physical stock — software, a licence, a download. It changes what the rest of the system expects of it.

Product condition is new, used, refurbished. Easy to leave blank, and worth setting where it affects the buying decision.

Inventory item is the important one. A product is what you sell; an inventory item is what you hold. Linking them is what lets a sale move stock. Without the link the product still sells perfectly well — it just does not touch your stock figures, which is correct for a service and wrong for a bag of cement.

   PRODUCT                 INVENTORY ITEM
   what a customer buys    what sits on a shelf
   name, price, photos     quantity, location, batch
            \                    /
             \-- linked here --/
                      |
             a sale moves stock

Categories decide whether anyone finds it

Parent category, product category and product subcategory place the product in your taxonomy. This is not filing for its own sake: it drives what customers can browse and filter on your public shop. A catalogue of four hundred uncategorised products is a search box and nothing else.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, create a product with a photo, a price and a category, then find it on the public shop the way a customer would — by browsing, not by using the link you kept. If you cannot reach it in three clicks, the categories need work, not the product.